


Spreadsheets

by Ji_ajiit



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Justin "Ransom" Oluransi is a Delicate Coral Reef, Mental Health Issues, Ransom & Spreadsheets, Spreadsheets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 15:15:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10642503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ji_ajiit/pseuds/Ji_ajiit
Summary: Lots of kids in the AP classes have things they get intense about. And lots of hockey players have superstitions they stick to. It's not different from that. Really.





	

Justin knows, ok? He's not stupid.

It's just that they make sense.

It didn't start as a big thing, of course. One of his teachers in middle school, in a fit of frustration at all the kids claiming work was saved on school computers and therefore they couldn't possibly work on it at home, had shown them how to make a gmail account, with the associated google drive.

It had kinda changed his life. Suddenly he could type his notes and search his notes and rearrange things after class and when he sat down before a test he could pretend that he was clicking through his drive, pulling up the right files so he'd know the right answers.

After the test, he could just cntrl+F the things he knew he'd gotten wrong and sometimes his notes told him he'd been right and sometimes they told him he had been wrong, but at least he knew for sure and could pull himself together before his moms got home.

In high school his system got even better, because he realized he could organize links to his notes in one master spreadsheet and then all the information was there. Where it needed to be. Nearly filed, so none of it could get lost. Yeah, he knew most people his age didn't have carefully labled files in the cloud. It made life easier though, having something organized that way, so he tried to not think about it.

Then he was trying to plan his sophomore year, and he realized he could format his spreadsheets and make one a schedule planner that spot out what would go where, and he could tweak the colors until they were just right, and sometimes he spent a bit too long adjusting the margins but it was ok. It was just something that he liked organized a specific way, that's all. Lots of people in his AP classes had things they did in a specific way.

Then, junior year, he accidentally gave a group project member access to the entire folder for 11 AP US History, instead of the nested folder for Project 2, EJ/AKL/AL. By the time he revoked the permission, half his stuff was gone and there were little comments from Emily in his class notes - not in any pattern, just randomly scattered throughout, and she didn't use the right level of bullet points so it was all

_wrong._

And ok, he'd started color coding the links in his spreadsheet of notes for the class (not his spreadsheet of all class notes, this was the linked APUSH spreadsheet) by what had already been tested on and what was still to be tested, and maybe he'd written a command so that as the test date got closer the link color would change, and maybe there were color changing links for days of class that were two months away (he wasn't crazy, if the material hadn't been presented yet the link showed up in various shades of blue, blue so light you could hardly see for the end of term stuff and steadily darkening as it got closer to being covered in class because blue was supposed to be a calming color but he wasn't sure it was working) but he had a SYSTEM and it WORKED and that asshole had messed it up.

He couldn't be sure, though. He had to check all his commands, all the hidden If()Then= that worked together to make sure it all worked so he wouldn't forget anything so he would be prepared for projects and assessments and tests because he had to get it right.

It took a couple of days, and his note-taking in class suffered, but he checked all his links and commands. It turned out Emily actually hadn't changed anything in the spreadsheet, just put some stuff in a new folder which was why the routing directions weren't working anymore.

When he finished fixing everything, he slumped back in his spinning desk chair in his bedroom, face to the ceiling. He was just so tired. He hadn't been able to sleep well, not while he was thinking about the possible damage to his system.

He knew he was maybe getting a little... intense about his spreadsheets. He'd known for a while, comments from his classmates making him try to hide just how elaborate his system was. What could he do, though? It wasn't like he could go to his moms and tell them "hey, I know I've got a 4.0 but I've been having a problem with spreadsheets and think I need to talk to someone." No way. They were proud of him. They had enough to think about.

So he did what he knew how to do. He made a spreadsheet.

He titled it Master_1_AY2011. That way, he could eventually change to Master_#_2016. There would be about six months of overlap when he graduated college and started with Master_#_2016, but that would give him time to implement any changes he needed between school spreadsheets and real-life spreadsheets.

He filled Master_1_AY2011 with all his tier one links. Links to spreadsheets of links to class notes, pro-con lists of different colleges, the master travel schedule for his moms... everything he was using in Academic Year 2011. The only link directly to a document - his most important link - led to Use_Guidelines.xls

No edit access above the project document level. No view access above the project folder level.  
One hour a day to format his spreadsheets. In class, he wouldn't mess with formatting.  
Class. Was. For notes.  
No formatting time overwriting sleep time.  
If other people were working on the spreadsheet with him, it didn't count against his one hour.

Not that he thought that someone ever would. But a guy can dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Reading the comic, I couldn't help but fall in love with Ransom And His Spreadsheets. This draws on my discovery in college that not everyone organizes their class notes into nested folders based on handouts vs. notes, unit, class, department, semester, year. Who knew?


End file.
